Studies Show Injections Can Relieve Heart Ailment

December 22, 1998|By New York Times

Two small studies have shown that over the course of just a few weeks one dose of experimental drugs injected into the heart can greatly relieve, or even eliminate, the chest pain of coronary artery disease, researchers in the United States and Germany said.

The injections encourage the growth of new blood vessels to bypass clogged arteries, the researchers said.

The research is preliminary, and the drugs have to be tested in large groups of people. Even if the results hold up, it may be years before any therapy is available for patients who suffer from such chest pain, or angina.

One treatment is gene therapy to produce a protein called vegF, for vascular endothelial growth factor. The other entails injection of a protein called FGF-1, for fibroblast growth factor.

Each drug is given in a single injection, through a surgical incision in the chest.

Both treatments aim to allow patients to grow their own heart bypasses by sprouting thin ``collateral'' blood vessels, in a strategy called therapeutic angiogenesis.

The same gene therapy involved in one of these treatments has been shown to be effective in building new blood vessels in the legs, but these reports are the first to assert that gene therapy has produced new vessels in the heart.

The coronary gene therapy research, led by Dr. Jeffrey Isner of St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Mass., and Tufts University, is reported in today's issue of Circulation, a journal published by the American Heart Association.

The protein therapy is being developed by Dr. Thomas-Joseph Stegmann of Fulda, Germany, a leading figure in the field, who discussed his work in interviews.

So far, tests of both therapies are in the first stage, in which research determines whether the treatment is safe to patients.